The insatiable demand for entertainment continues to drive technology. Movies are available on VHS, DVD, as well through pay-per-view via cable, satellite, or internet. Governments and large corporations also help to create and fuel this demand by developing new paradigms for transmitting the content.
One of the latest movements in the entertainment industry is the push for digital television, including High Definition Television commonly known as HDTV. Even the federal government, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is at the center of this latest television revolution. Most major television markets currently include at least one active terrestrial and/or satellite HDTV channel with HDTV programming. This new High Definition Television standard dramatically improves picture resolution, while also permitting multiplexing (also called multicasting), which is dividing up a single HDTV broadcast signal into multiple, simultaneous broadcast signals. While dividing up the single HDTV signal will cause a lower resolution for each of the resulting signals, their resolution will still be much better than the resolution available under the current analog television broadcast standard (known as NTSC).
While HDTV will bring more flexibility in broadcasting through multiplexing and a greater resolution to the broadcasted content, High Definition Television remains a new frontier that is largely unexplored.